Me, Laura and Mary Katherine Flannigan

I’m a founding member of my book group that turned 25 this week. In three years, I will have been in the same book group for half my life.

Like most enterprises, book group started with one of those “Hey, you know what we should do?” comments. My friends, Steve and Laura, were at our house one day when Laura noticed the Robertson Davies books on the bookshelf. We instantly went to the book conversation, and I don’t know what the boys did because all I remember is talking books all afternoon with her.

At some point, the conversation came around to stories or characters that had stayed with us since childhood. When Laura said Mrs. Mike (aka Mary Katherine Flannigan), I was shocked. I’d never met anyone who had read (and re-read and re-read that book multiple times) as I had done. We could quote lines. We knew Oh-Be-Joyful’s backstory. We cried when the babies died and were terrified when the wildfire jumped the river.

It didn’t take us long to decide to form a book club. The two of us quickly decided some parameters: the books had to be in paperback so they’d be cheap to buy and easy to stuff in our bags for our metro commute. We wanted to read for fun, so they had to be fiction. We wanted to support women writers, so all the authors had to be women (although we made allowances if a book had a strong female character). We agreed that we would never read the same author twice, lest we read every book by one author. I’m proud to say this rule led us to “discover” Barbara Kingsolver long before the rest of the world. And since eating and drinking were going to figure in to this plan, we decided it had to be at a different restaurant every month.

Laura and I loved a good process.

We picked a book, invited some friends to read it and talk about over dinner at AV’s Ristorante, an old, family-run Italian place on New York Avenue that had been there for literally 40 years. The Shell Seekers, by Rosamund Pilcher, was on all the lists right about then, so we started there. I recently found my copy at my mom’s house last summer and reread it. It holds up, I’m pleased to say.

You’d be amazed; some of those books you read decades ago are every bit as good as you remember them to be. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn will take you back to summers on the porch reading it for the first time. Rebecca is even better now. And hoo-boy! Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls! I felt like such a bad girl reading those. It was fantastic.

In the early years, we would all choose a book by consensus, a model that just didn’t work for a group of well-read, type-A women. Half the night would be “discussions” over the next book to read. People came and went. Singles got married, marrieds got divorced, other marrieds had babies. There were weddings to discuss, job interviews to strategize about and moves to contemplate. There were new guys, new jobs, new haircuts, and book group became like therapy.

We read; we talk; we eat and drink; we solve the world’s problems. Sometimes, we forget to talk about the book. I remember one girl left the group because we weren’t “literary enough.” Sometimes people ask how it works, if one person “does the research” or “presents the book.” I just laugh.

My friend Blair called Monday nights “BFC Night” as in “books for chicks.” My friend Jeff calls it Bad Girls’ Book Group because sometimes only one person has read the book and everyone else just shows up for the wine.

We moved The Monday Night Book Group to Wednesday in the early years, but Wednesday Night Book Group didn’t sound right. So we call it The Monday Night Book Group That Meets on Wednesday.

Laura and Steve moved to Denver, and book group went on. Laura would call me to talk books and get ideas for what we called The Rocky Mountain Chapter of book group. She planned work trips to DC to coincide with meetings, because a good book group is hard to find.

We’ve read a lot of books in the last 25 years. Not all of them have been good. Laura never lived down choosing The Eight, and I still regret choosing Peachtree Road. I hated one book so much that I tossed it in the trash can as I walked to work one day, having barely gotten halfway through it. Some of them I didn’t read at all, some of them I remember so well I can quote passages. Some, while fun, have been downright weird (Are you listening Geek Love?). There are characters I read about 20 years ago whom I still remember (Clyde Chukka from Patty Jane’s House of Curl springs to mind. Ruby and Rose Darlen from The Girls. )

Certainly Mary Katherine Flannigan has stayed with me since I first read about her in fifth grade. She taught me what pleurisy was. She opened the Canadian wilderness to me, a suburban Houston kid. She gave me an instant and enduring connection to Laura.

In 1993, Laura gave her back to me. My inscribed copy of Mrs.

 Mike is my favorite book. I read it about once a year. Laura died in 2012 after doing her damnedest to beat the cancer in her brain. After Laura’s funeral, I was telling one of her Denver friends the story of how we met and the Mrs. Mike connection. She told me that Laura had been reading that book to her daughter before she died. I love my book even more now. Happy memories, indeed, my friend. Thank you.

Here are my top five book-group books, although this list changes from time to time. I’ve left off the books that were bestsellers (like Memoirs of a Geisha & Water for Elephants) because while I did love them, everyone loved them. Here are some hidden gems.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

True confession: sometimes a piece of writing is so lovely that I read it out loud to hear the words come together. The Night Circus was like that. The story of lighting the clock each night is mesmerizing.

The Girls by Lori Lansens

I was reading this on a plane, and at one part, I started weeping. It was beautifully written but also a sad part of the story. I did what any other weepy reader would do: I read it several more times. Later, when I was alone, I read that passage out loud.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

We talked about this book over many months, and that’s odd for our group. One girl even did research on Chinese foot-binding traditions, and believe me, we are not a group that works that hard. This is a fascinating story of friendship that got right to the heart of our group.

Keeper of the House by Rebecca Godwin

A young black woman, Mignon tells her story as a housekeeper in a white South Carolina brothel over several decades. She is one of the wisest female characters I’ve read, and I wanted her story to go on and on.

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith by Gina Nahai

I’ll admit I like mystical realism in my novels from time to time (see above re: The Night Circus). This book delivers that beautifully. Set in an Iranian ghetto with an unforgettable cast of characters, this is some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever encountered. It’s full of just beautiful images constructed in the most elegant way possible. This book is probably why I’m so hard on other books.

Honorable mentions: I think books are always better than the movie, and here’s a couple of reasons why.

Chocolat. Look, I love Johnny Depp as much as the next girl, and any movie with him and chocolate can’t be ignored. But the book is more interesting, especially the end. No disrespect to Alfred Molina, who I think can act the heck out of any role, but in the book, the priest is a much more interesting antagonist.

The Talented Mr. Ripley. I didn’t even want to read this book because I thought the movie was so boring. I’m so glad I didn’t listen to that voice in my head, because this book was really good. There were times when I couldn’t read fast enough to see what was happening.

If you want to see our list of books over the years, it’s public info.

15 Years Since Yesterday

April 23, 2000 -- It is the last night of my dad’s life, only I don’t know this yet.

It’s early in the morning of April 23, 2015 right now, 15 years since that night. I know where I was, where I was sitting, what I was saying, because it’s like it happened yesterday. In the last week of my dad’s life, he was at home with hospice care, and I sat up with him on the night shift while everyone else slept. It was lonely and scary, and I’m so grateful for that time.

I had a spiral notebook, and during that last week, I wrote pages and pages of things that had happened or things that were going on with his health or what it felt like to walk this awful journey. Part of me didn’t want to remember, yet part of me didn’t want to forget. So I did what I always do—I wrote.

After he died, I tore out the pages, folded them in quarters and put them in the envelope with all the condolence cards my friends sent. A few years ago, I was going through the cards and found the folded-up pages. I brought them down to my kitchen and set them on fire with the flame from my gas stove and tossed them in the sink to burn.

I never read them after I first wrote them, and I never read them again. Ever. Someone told me that my mind would edit memories for me so that the sad and awful things would gradually subside and I’d be left with the memories I wanted to keep. I was afraid that reading those pages would interrupt that process.

It seems to be truer by the year, I suppose. While I remember a good deal of things I sometimes want to forget, I’ve no doubt forgotten other things. I guess I’m happy about that. I’m at the point where I no longer care whether the memories actually happened. They live in my memory, and I’m good with that—right or wrong.

I remember that my dad fried the bacon in our house. I never remember my mom frying bacon--only my dad and only on Sunday mornings. He was very patient with it, and the wait was torture. I fry bacon now using his “low and slow” method, and when I’m tempted to toss it all in the skillet to save time, I hold back.

My dad taught me how to tie a tie. A tie was part of the Brownie uniform in the ‘60s, and I would stand at the full-length mirror with my dad behind me, tying my little orange tie around my neck. At some point, I probably could have done it myself, but it was more fun this way with my dad.

I never saw my dad wear shorts or go barefoot, which is really odd when you consider that’s practically my family’s uniform. He wore a long-sleeved shirt to my wedding, but I think that’s probably the only time I saw him in long sleeves.

When we moved to our new house, he built me really long shelves for all my stuffed animals and painted my room Crocus. I got to pick the paint color, and I didn’t even know what a crocus was. It was purple and that was good enough for me. He forbade me to stick thumbtacks in the newly-painted wall though, and this was a problem because I had roughly 739 pictures of David Cassidy cut out of my Tiger Beat magazines that needed to be put back in their proper place. He didn’t back down, but he did make me giant bulletin board that was probably seven feet long.

He drank Pearl beer and liked sardines. Do you know anyone who eats sardines out of a little tin container? My dad did.

My dad was the office manager of a contracting company, and sometimes he brought “homework” home to do at the kitchen table. He would sign checks and collate and staple things, and when he let me help him, it was the greatest job in the world. Little did I know that was going to be real-world experience.

Once, my dad took me out to dinner, just the two of us. I was maybe 12 or so, and I had to get dressed up. We went to this Italian restaurant on the Gulf Freeway, which was probably not particularly good or even all that fancy. But it wasn’t Luby’s or Bonanza, so it felt grown-up. I ate lasagna, and it came in one of those crockery dishes where you know they just put the whole thing in the oven. I had never seen that before.  Like I said, fancy.

I like this photo because if you know
to look, you can see my dad's blue
eyes.

My dad and I were the late church-goers in our family (probably because the bacon took so long to cook). We went to 11:30 Mass, and at that hour on Sundays, there was a radio show on his usual AM country station in his trusty red Ford pick-up truck. I think they just played the same set list every week, because it seemed like every Sunday on the way to church, we heard Don Williams and Emmylou Harris singing “If I Needed You.” We loved that song. It was our father-daughter dance at my wedding. I whispered it in his ear on that last night of his life:

If I needed you, would you come to me?

Would you come to me for to ease my pain?

If you needed me, I would come to you.

I would swim the seas for to ease your pain.

My dad used Aqua Velva Ice Blue aftershave and Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco, so he always smelled like a combination of these two things. Although on the weekends, he smelled like our garage—part lawnmower gas, part grass clippings, part sawdust or paint.

My dad tried to fix me up with one of his friend’s sons (aka “one of Buddy's boys”), who I later discovered was Randy Quaid. I guess I’m pretty happy that didn’t materialize. He did fix me up once with another guy’s son when I was in college. It was the worst blind date of all time. And I’m pretty sure my boyfriend wasn’t too happy about it, either.

When I had my first root canal, I was away at college. My dad sent me a World’s Finest Chocolate bar in an envelope with a note written on the label: “Maybe this will help your aching tooth.” The chocolate is long gone, but I still have the wrapper.

Tripoley was a big deal in our house, and my dad was the guy who slyly slipped a few blue chips in his shirt pocket when he won a hand, so that at the end of the night, he unearthed a couple extra dollars to add to his winnings. Later, when we had our own Tripoley parties at the kitchen table, someone would run into the living room to ask his advice on a poker hand. Inevitably, everyone folded.

Once, when I lived in Missouri, I called my dad in Houston because I heard a noise outside my house. It never occurred to me to call 911.

When I moved to DC, he bought me my very own tool box and stocked it with things I’d need, including a note on his Frank Horrigan memo pad that says, “Never mess with anything electric. Love, Dad.”

Frank Horrigan. That’s my dad’s name. It’s also Clint Eastwood’s character in “In the Line of Fire.” I love that movie because I get to hear my dad’s name all the time, despite the fact that my dad could not be less like Clint Eastwood if he’d tried.

On the anniversary of my dad’s death, I always go to Mass and then do something that reminds me of him. The first year, I went to a hardware store and wandered the aisles. I needed that smell again. This year, I’m going to a baseball game. My dad took me to Astros games and tried not to roll his eyes when I put up a Greg Gross poster in my closet. (Where it still hangs, I might add.)

It feels like 2000 all over again except that I don’t have a spiral notebook and the good memories are coming back to the front of my brain. I guess that’s progress.